RECOMENDACIONES

Introduction

From placenames to monuments, and tourist trails to public houses, the visitor to Mayo would be hard pressed to pass through the county and avoid reference to the 1798 Rebellion. Indeed, the Rebellion and its subsequent remembrance provide the ideal opportunity to view the changing modes of commemoration with regards to a single event, over space and through time. Such changing modes are more often than not indicative of shifting contemporary concerns and preoccupations that inevitably infuse the rituals which surround historic anniversaries. The various commemorations of 1798 also provide scope to explore the relationship between formal national commemoration and the unique form o f localised commemorative heritages that have manifested themselves on a county level.

In this chapter it is thus intended to investigate the commemorative events which centred on the key anniversaries of the 1798 Rebellion in 1848, 1898, 1948 and 1998. With regards to each, details o f events at national level will form a backdrop to the examination o f the commemorations which have taken place in Mayo. In examining these localised commemorations, the chapter will focus on the remembrance o f events and personalities of the Rebellion, which were specific to Mayo. This investigation will focus on the way in which historical consciousness of 1798 has been shaped and structured not only by various historiographies, but also by gatherings, ceremonies, re-enactments and particularly the plethora of monuments, which its memory has spawned within the cultural landscape.

In order to again contextualise details of subsequent remembrances, the chapter will commence with a brief account of the initially successful yet ultimately doomed Franco- Irish campaign of 1798. Taking a chronological view and systematic sample, the major 50- year junctures at which the Rebellion has been commemorated will then be critically charted with regards to principal events and players in Mayo and at a more macro level.

Particular attention will be given to the centenary o f the Rebellion in 1898 when commemoration o f the event became a key battleground between opposing political factions. Other intermittent acts of remembrance which have taken place in the county outside of the principal commemorative periods will also be examined. Finally, the chapter will conclude by surmising the evolution of commemorative practices regarding the Rebellion o f 1798.

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The Rebellion of 1798

The 1798 Rebellion was predicated by the American War o f Independence (1775- 83) and the French revolution of 1789, but was more immediately precipitated by a determined campaign o f counter-insurgency by Crown forces. While eighteenth-century Western Europe was awash with new thinking on the Rights o f Man, democracy and republicanism, as well as an increasing disenchantment with tyranny and royalism, such Enlightenment ideas were slow to take root in Ireland - lacking as it did a universal system of education.

Anonymously published in 1791 by a young Protestant barrister, Theobald Wolfe Tone’s An Argument on behalf o f the Catholics o f Ireland, called for Catholics and Protestants to unite in mutual respect and esteem, to fight for Irish independence.1 Tone’s views led to an invitation later that year to establish the Society o f United Irishmen in Belfast with Samuel Neilson and Thomas Russell. Tone quickly established a Dublin society and smaller clubs soon sprang up in other urban centres. Membership was largely made up of liberal, educated and wealthy gentlemen o f Catholic, Protestant and Presbyterian backgrounds. The aims o f the society included parliamentary reform and the dismissal of English control over Irish affairs. Originally operating as more o f a debating club than anything else, the society was outlawed in 1794 and Tone — accused of treasonable activities, was forced into exile.2 In response, Samuel Neilson established the society as a secret oath-bound organisation whose objectives now leant themselves to physical force rebellion.

With France and England having gone to war in 1793, the French were eager to make contact with Republican sympathisers in Ireland with a view that an insurrection there would engage the enemy on two fronts. Tone travelled to France in 1796 and drew up plans with the ruling post-revolution Directory for a military expedition to Ireland.

Meanwhile the United Irishmen, motivated by the principles o f Liberty, Equality and Fraternity, had forged an unlikely alliance with the Defenders - a secret agrarian society with sectarian tendencies whose membership was steadily increasing owing to ongoing

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unrest over land ownership.

In December 1796 the French dispatched 15,000 troops on 35 vessels under the command of General Lazore Hoche to Ireland.4 Disastrous weather conditions meant that a number of ships were forced to turn back and those which did arrive at Bantry Bay, Co.

Cork, were unable to land. Although the French were disillusioned at the lack o f popular response to their imminent arrival, the potential o f the failed mission galvanised the United Irishmen and Defenders and their numbers swelled. Shocked by the attempted invasion, the British authorities instigated a brutal reign of terror and suppression in Ulster under General Lake which destroyed much of the United Irish network there. The campaign spread throughout the country and in early 1798, with plans for a rebellion to commence on 23 May, the United Irish leadership was decimated when a number of its key members including Thomas Addis Emmet, Oliver Bond and Lord Edward Fitzgerald were arrested.

The remaining leaders, however, risked all on one cast, and following the rising of individual units in Wicklow, Carlow, Kildare and Meath, Oulart Hill in Wexford was the location of the first major engagement of the Rebellion on 26 May.5

With communications links to France tenuous at best, news of the Rebellion was slow in filtering through. By the time Tone could point to the insurrection and appeal for a new campaign, the Rebellion in Ireland had all but been crushed. With France now engaged in Egypt, Bonaparte was reluctant to commit an expedition to Ireland, particularly with the memory of the apathetic response to Bantry Bay still fresh. Eventually, however, an order for assistance to Ireland, with the aim o f reigniting the Rebellion, was given.6

The French Campaign in the West

On 22 August 1798, the French frigates Concorde Franchise and Medee arrived at Kilcummin Head on the western shores o f Killala Bay, Co. Mayo having set sail from La Rochelle 16 days earlier. The flotilla was designed as part o f a larger armada; a separate mission from Brest, however, did not set sail until some time later and was captured off Lough Swilly, Co. Donegal in October, while plans for another larger expedition under the Irish bom General Kilmaine were abandoned. The forces, which did arrive, comprised 888 infantry, 42 inexperienced artillerymen, 57 cavalry and a staff of 35 officers.

Accompanying them were a handful of Irish men, among them, Bartholomew Teeling, the radical son of a Lisbum linen draper, Wolfe Tone’s brother Mathew and Henry O ’Keon, an ex-priest from Mayo who was fluent in French, Irish and English. The expeditionaries brought with them enough arms to equip 5,000 Irish men, and besides the infantry’s

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flintlock muskets, bayonets and swords, the cavalry was further equipped with sabres pistols and carbines. Three four-pounder field guns were also brought ashore. In command o

o f the French forces was General Jean Joseph-Amable Humbert, a 31 -year-old veteran o f the military campaign against the insurgents o f the Vendee.9

Having read a proclamation which announced their commitment to the ideals of

‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, Union’ on Irish soil and reminded their hosts o f their previous endeavours to Bantry Bay, the landing party marched to, and secured the nearby village o f Killala where they occupied the castle o f Church o f Ireland Bishop, Joseph Stock and established a base headquarters. With word quickly spreading o f the French arrival throughout the region, motley bands of Irish peasants began to descend on Killala to join the campaign. There, between 600-700 volunteers who enlisted with the French were drilled into parties and provided with weaponry and uniforms.10 A broad network of United Irishmen does not appear to have existed in Mayo; although two associates did come to Humbert’s aid, namely James McDonnell and George Blake.11 Despite the obvious enthusiasm of the peasant brigades, the French were taken aback by the unorganised and undisciplined nature of their charges.

The first military engagement of the joint forces was at Ballina, 20 kilometres south of Killala, where some 500 French and Irish troops under French Colonels Fontaine and Sarrazin, managed to take the garrison town in a two-pronged movement on 24 August.

Humbert now set his sights on the strategic and commercial centre o f Castlebar. There, General Hutchinson and 1,700 soldiers made up of the Warwickshire Regiment, Fraser Fencibles, Longford and Kilkenny Militias, Galway Volunteers, Lord Roden’s Fencible Dragoons and Carbineers were joined by General Lake - the victorious leader o f Wexford - in wait for the rebels.12 In what turned out to be a bold and decisive move, Humbert marched his army o f 800 French and the same number o f Irish, overnight across a secluded track that ran to the west of Lough Conn. This route provided an alternative to their expccted march through Foxford and although highly laborious, provided the allies with an element o f surprise on reaching Catlebar (despite the fact that some artillery had to be abandoned.) Arriving at early morning on the outskirts o f the town, the rebels attacked with the Irish in the centre flanked by the French on either side. Repelled at first by loyalist fire, the combined forced regrouped and were rallied by Sarrazin who led a group to attack the flank of the government line. Charging forward with fixed bayonets, Sarrazin’s men

caused the opposing cavalry to scatter. The inexperienced militia without cover were thus frightened into retreat. With the Loyalists in disarray the French pressed home their advantage and following some running street battles and despite a number o f strongholds being staunchly defended by small groups o f Loyalists, the government forces were forced to flee the town in a humiliating evacuation which came to be known as the ‘Races of Castlebar’.13

With almost the entire county now falling to the rebels, looting and rowdiness became widespread. Humbert dispatched officers to various towns in a bid to organise and restore social order under local leaderships. In Castlebar, a 12 man provisional government for Connaught was established, and presided over by John Moore - a member o f a wealthy local landowning Catholic family - who had been educated in France.14 Humbert spent a week in Castlebar where, initially buoyed by his success, he began to realise that there was not as strong appetite for further concerted engagements as he had anticipated. Finances for such hostilities were in any case not available.

As news of the French victory reached Dublin, Lord Cornwallis, Viceroy and Commander-in-Chief, decided to take personal charge o f the situation. A blockade was established at Enniskillen to prevent any advance by Humbert into Ulster. Soldiers in Leinster were ordered to fixed stations and a force o f 2,500 advanced from the East under General Lake while Cornwallis himself moved from Tuam in the South with a troop of 7,000. Upon realising that the expected reinforcements from France were not to arrive, Humbert decided to push out of Mayo, through the northwest and on to Dublin. Departing Castlebar on 3 September with a band o f only 600 Irishmen under McDonnell, Humbert and his army marched onward through Swinford and managed to sidestep General Lake - who had advanced to Ballaghadereen - as he pushed his charges into Sligo.15

Fighting off a minor attack by local yeomanry at Tubbercurry, Humbert’s men were engaged by the Limerick militia at Cooloney whom they easily overwhelmed with their superior numbers and tactical manoeuvring. With Lake’s men having turned, and now in pursuit from the West, and Cornwallis closing in from the South, the Franco-Irish army embarked on a last ditch effort to join up with insurgents who had staged minor uprisings in Longford and north Westmeath. Their progress was finally halted at Ballinamuck on 8 September by Cornwallis’s and Lake’s contingents. Having engaged in an increasingly

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futile confrontation, Humbert finally surrendered. While the French were taken as prisoners of war and eventually repatriated, several hundred Irish were slaughtered on the battlefield or as they attempted to flee; others including Mathew Tone and Bartholemew Teeling were captured and hanged at the location.16

In the wake o f Ballinamuck, a bitter campaign o f suppression was waged against the remaining insurgents in Mayo. John Moore was apprehended in Castlebar and brought to Waterford where he later died while awaiting trial. Many were charged with treason and hanged, and Killala was brutally recaptured with 300 rebels slain to death by the cavalry on 23 September. Along the north coast o f the county, houses and villages were destroyed as suspected rebels and abettors were captured, tried and executed.17

The ‘Year o f the French’ left a legacy o f human suffering and divisiveness. Those who took up arms were mostly poor and uneducated peasants who were by no means fighting for the broad and inclusive ideals of the United Irishmen - who for their part did not have a strong foothold in that part of the country. No Protestants joined Humbert’s campaign while the Catholics who did join did so more out o f atavistic economic and agrarian dissatisfaction than anything else. Looting was widespread and only Wexford and Wicklow surpassed Mayo in the amount of compensation paid out to ’suffering Loyalists’.18 Sectarianism was not a motivating factor and no Protestants were killed other than on the battlefield - a circumstance attributed by Bishop Stock to the restraint, exercised at times, by the French over their Irish recruits.19 Protestants on suspicion of being Orangemen were, however, apprehended by rebels in Ballina and a number of Presbyterian meeting-houses were vandalised.

That the French and the Irish made for precarious brothers-in-arms is certainly true.

Cultural differences were often explicitly evident, none more so than in the anti-clerical French suspicion o f the deep-rooted religious presence among their hosts. The unruliness o f the Irish, who seemed quite content with immediate profit or gain, was at odds too with the wider aims o f French republicanism. With regards to military peculiarities, it has been noted by Freyer that at least one French colonel was loathe to witness the Irish

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employment of pikes against regular troops.

Although the French campaign o f late summer 1798 has been moulded into a heroic historic narrative, ambivalence still surrounds both the operation and its leader, Humbert. That Humbert’s appointment was frowned upon by other French generals and that his impetuosity in putting to sea may have precipitated the capture o f the overall commander, Hardy, off Donegal, has been documented, yet never fully explored. 21

Humbert’s aloofness from his Irish troops may have been due to his host’s lack of political awareness, but perhaps too, to a mistrust o f Catholics engendered by his campaign in the Vendee. It has also been noted that Humbert had to quell a near mutiny en route to Ireland and was later to bear the criticisms of his subordinate commanders, particularly General

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Sarrazin - a man credited with much o f the French tactical success. There have also been suggestions that the French brought about the slaughter o f their allies at Ballinamuck by pushing them to the front o f the battle.23 Described as a ‘foolhardy adventure, too late and far too little’, the success o f Humbert’s offensive has also been put down to Cornwallis’s excessive caution in engaging the rebels in a second whole-scale engagement.24 It is further of note that upon his return to France, Humbert was never to receive a further promotion and after some undistinguished postings was forced into exile in America. Despite such uncertainties, the French expedition has been constructed, particularly in its area of occurrence, as one of the greatest ‘What Ifs?’ in Irish history.

In the aftermath of the failed 1798 Rebellion there was an obvious retreat from the principles and ideologies o f the United Irishmen by many who had formerly been loyal to their cause. Such withdrawal was due in part to fear of retribution but also simply to the deflated spirits of those involved. This void was largely filled by what would become the seminal loyalist historiography o f 1798, Sir Richard Musgrave’s Memoirs o f the Various Rebellions that was published in 1801. Musgrave’s account sought to establish wholly sectarian motives as the grounds for action and linked the Rebellion with those o f 1690 and 1641, presenting each as a phase in a sustained attempt by Catholics to depose Protestant authority. A half a century after 1798 however, a new generation o f Irish nationalists were identifying with the United Irishmen and beginning to rehabilitate the memory of the Rebellion.

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Although described as ‘an act of utmost commemoration’, the attempted rising of the Young Irelanders 50 years after the Rebellion of 1798, owed more to the political ideological programme, the poem displays obvious continuing sympathies for the ‘brave’

‘patriots’ of 1798. Written by John Kells Ingram, son o f a Church o f Ireland rector, while studying at Trinity College, Dublin, ‘The Memory of the Dead’ would become the anthem of subsequent ’98 commemorations: revolutionary republicanism and to be seen following a strictly constitutionalist agenda.

Ryder has attributed this to not only to a psychological repression o f memory o f ‘a very

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divisive and slaughterous series o f events’, but also, to simply a fear o f prosecution.

Indeed ‘The Memory o f the Dead’ was produced as evidence against Charles Gavan Duffy, co-founder of The Nation, during his trial and conviction for seditious conspiracy in 1844.

Such reticence also belies the strong personal links between many of the leaders o f the Young Irelanders and the United Irishmen. John Blake Dillon and John Mitchel’s respective fathers were United Irishmen and Gavan Duffy recorded the specific United Irishmen who had a formative political influence upon him. Following on from nationalist historian Dr. R. R. Madden’s positive portrayal o f the leadership of the 1798 Rebellion in United Irishmen, Their Life and Times (published in 1842), which had Commemoration of the Rebellion in 1848

identified Wolfe Tone’s grave at Bodenstown, Co. Kildare, Thomas Davis made it a focal point of commemoration. In 1843 he published an heroic memorialisation o f the United Irish leader in the form o f a poetic homily entitled ‘Tone’s Grave’. A year later the Young Irelanders erected a black marble memorial to Tone at Bodenstown, although no formal ceremony was conducted in order to avoid embarrassing O ’Connell in his dealings with the government, again indicating the ongoing sensitivities surrounding the memory o f 1798.

At the time of his death in 1845, Davis was also engaged in a biography o f Tone.

A further homage to the memory of 1798 can be seen in the establishment of the many Confederate Clubs across Ireland in the twelve months leading up to the Young Ireland Rebellion in 1848. Backed by the Young Irelanders who had become disillusioned with a perceived sense of inertia in the O ’Connellite movement, the Confederation numbered 200 clubs at their peak and boasted a combined membership o f over 40,000 people. According their leader Thomas Meagher, they had as their overall aim, ‘to destroy English interest in this country root and branch, to institute a national government...and, by our laws and arms, to restore the country in its full integrity and glory to its own brave people’.29 Although largely confining themselves to social and cultural activities (visits to Tone’s grave being a popular pilgrimage for respective clubs), the Confederation took on a

A further homage to the memory of 1798 can be seen in the establishment of the many Confederate Clubs across Ireland in the twelve months leading up to the Young Ireland Rebellion in 1848. Backed by the Young Irelanders who had become disillusioned with a perceived sense of inertia in the O ’Connellite movement, the Confederation numbered 200 clubs at their peak and boasted a combined membership o f over 40,000 people. According their leader Thomas Meagher, they had as their overall aim, ‘to destroy English interest in this country root and branch, to institute a national government...and, by our laws and arms, to restore the country in its full integrity and glory to its own brave people’.29 Although largely confining themselves to social and cultural activities (visits to Tone’s grave being a popular pilgrimage for respective clubs), the Confederation took on a